The following is from The Code Newsletter for March 18, 2008 published by Andi MacMillian-Steward & Jag Steward
www.mayan-calendar-code.com
CLEARING UP SOME MONKEY BUSINESS
The myth of the "hundredth monkey" first surfaced in the late 1970s in Lifetide (Simon & Schuster, 1979), by New Age scientist Lyall Watson. The book is on Amazon here: Book On Amazon
In 1982, Ken Keyes Jr. popularized the parable in The Hundredth Monkey (Vision Books), an anti-nuclear-war treatise that sold more than 1 million copies.
Book on Amazon
The monkey myth, as recounted by Keyes, goes like this:
On an island near Japan, scientists distributed sandy sweet potatoes to a colony of monkeys. Soon one young monkey learned how to wash the sand off the potatoes before eating them. She taught the trick first to her mother and then to other young monkeys. More and more young monkeys started teaching their parents how to wash sweet potatoes. One day, the 100th monkey learned how to wash the sandy spuds -- and at that moment, miraculously, all of the monkeys started washing their potatoes. Even more amazing, the potato-washing practice leapt over land and sea: Monkeys on other islands were suddenly washing their food too.
According to Keyes, the story demonstrates the power of a critical mental mass: "When a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind."
For those who want scientific information about organizational transformation, this is a compelling story. Is it true? No.
In 1985, Ron Amundson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, published "The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon" (Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1985). Part of the article is located here: Book on Amazon
Amundson documented that there had been a colony of monkeys -- on an island called Koshima. And many of those monkeys did learn how to wash sweet potatoes. But the number of monkeys never exceeded 59. And there was no evidence of a leap of consciousness from monkey to monkey.
Confronted with this information, myth creator Watson responded in the Whole Earth Review, Fall 1986 with this quote, "It is a metaphor of my own making, based . . . on very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay."
Watson's admission did not stem the tide of the use of this story.
Whole Earth Review Magazine can be found online here: http://www.wholeearth.com
In 2005, Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Emory University's Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta (http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/dewaal.html) was contacted by a group of doctors to find out if there was proof the story was true.
De Waal, who has been studying primates for 28 years, had recently returned from Koshima (in 2005) with an update on the potato-washing monkeys. This is what he said during the interview, "There are now about 100 monkeys in the colony", de Waal says, "but there is still no mind-meld miracle. And the percentage of monkeys that wash their potatoes has declined to about 25%: The monkeys may see, but the monkeys no do. It's clearly a made-up story."
I'm glad you brought this up. I have always understood this story to be a metaphor, but I think many believe it literally. I do believe in the "critical mass" or "tipping point," but only metaphorically. If it were literally true, it would be a deadly tool for manipulation in the hands of the elite.
Part and parcel of the story is the idea of psychic transmission through some kind of oversoul or blanket consciousness. I also believe in this, but I don't believe it's as simple a mechanism as the story suggests. It brings up the question: does our DNA program us, or vice versa? There is a new belief that we program our DNA through our beliefs and thoughts. This is intriguing, but completely unproven as far as I know.
The tipping point is the point of no return, and we are close to it. Once it happens, the old order will slide rapidly into oblivion. If the hundredth monkey story were literally true and applicable to human affairs, things would be so simple. But I don't see it happening. I live in a seniors complex with literally hundreds of cranky, sick, miserable old people. Not all are of course, but there is little joy here that I can see. People die in their living rooms and in their beds, and their spirits sometimes swirl around. So although I have my cranky moments, how come I live in joy among all this loneliness and misery? The hundredth monkey principle indicates I should be psychically attuned to the others around me. Thanks be to the Universe, it doesn't work that way!
8-D
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The 100th Monkey Syndrome may be just a story - but from what I read it did lead to a lot of research on the possibilities.
I have no doubt that one reason the story has caught on the way it has, is that it represents some kind of archetypal wish-fulfillment for many. I believe in the idea myself, as I said above. I think you're right, Dennis, that some good stuff has come from this, and more is needed. Part of the problem for me is documentation: this research is not mainstream for the most part, and any really new insight is stoutly resisted by that mainstream, both in academia and in the media. And when it does become mainstream, I don't fully trust it anyway. This is probably one reason I stay so focused on people, rocks, trees, and photography.
Take a look at the electric universe theory. It's elegantly simple, is perfectly in synch with what we already know of natural laws AND can be demonstrated on a small scale in the lab. Not only that, it neatly wraps up the answers to many questions that are either mysteries in conventional physics and astronomy, or are explained by utterly preposterous theories with no model in reality whatsoever. So you'd think science would rush to embrace it. Alas, things have not changed all that much since Galileo, and we know from history it will take the scientists close to a century to catch up. That's science vs scientism. The hundredth monkey story is, it seems to me, on a different level.
It could accurately be called disinformation, considering its source. But I'm not sure we should judge so harshly. It does illustrate or represent a truth. In that way it is not very different from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, except that it was presented as fact instead of a novel. Well, everyone knows that many of the deepest truths come from great fiction. And everyone knows that facts can be made to lie - that unfortunately is the current paradigm of the culture we live in, making facts to lie as well as lying outright, which has never gone out of style. But just because someone is not telling the truth, doesn't mean that the truth is not revealed through his words.
We're entering the area of myth. Some of our current myths - by this I mean stories which convey deep truths to us, while we clearly understand them to be stories, not facts - include J. L. Seagull, The Celestine Prophecy, and certainly others. The reason these form a mythos is that they are harmonious in presenting a larger picture of reality than we have known before, which we call our new paradigms. We can draw a parallel with the Bible. I consider it to be possibly the most important document in existence in many ways. I do not however consider it to be the literal or historic truth in the sense of factual data, except in the very broadest sense. I won't take space here going over why I do consider it the living word of the Divine prepared for our peculiar time and era, except to say that I find more in it that supports our new paradigms than supports either Christianity or Judaism as they are currently practiced. My point is that we've adopted a new paradigm that in many ways supersedes what is revealed or at least commonly understood in our time from the Bible. And the same is true of past scriptures like the Upanishads. While they continue to reveal deep truths and were vibrantly part of their time, they no longer resonate with the same urgency.
Our new paradigms and understandings build on those of the past, and are raising us from the dense 3D world into something better. Just as those scriptures and revelations did in their time. But all religions begin in ecstasy and end in power games. This time I hope we have moved beyond the need for formal religion.
So with the hundredth monkey story, we have a snapshot of a truth which may be proven by research in time, and accepted by most as it is now accepted by many. And we have a growing body of mythical stories - I have to use that word, in the sense that Joseph Campbell used it - which are forming our new reality. In time, these stories may even be collected into a book somewhat like our own Bible. Therein will lie a crossroads, perhaps a thousand years hence. Will we know which way to go?
More research is needed...
8-D
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Perhaps we're arriving at a broader understanding of what myths really are, and why they are needed. When we studied the Greek and Roman myths in school, they were quaint stories, no different from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. A little more gory, to be sure, but some of those fairy tales are actually pretty creepy. Anyway, if you've read Ovid's retelling of Greek myths in the Metamorphoses - a best seller in the time of Christ - then plainly back then, they had the impact of a blockbuster movie.
I'm not entirely clear on whether people back then believed their myths were literal history. Many did not, but I'm sure fundamentalism has always existed. It made no difference because these stories illustrated truth for these people. It gave them a cultural bedrock that was both an ethnic identity and an ethical structure. Our Judeo-Christian myths are the same - and like all myths, there is a historical basis. By the time it reaches mythological status, it's metaphorical rather than factual.
For the last several generations, the people of the world have been willing to adopt myths that were crafted for us by groups that wanted to control us. The advent of TV and other mass communications - I was born in 1950 so I remember most of this - created the possibility of hammering mythic ideas into the skulls of millions of people, and the PTB lost no time in doing exactly that. Without going into all the many myths that were created this way, what we're seeing now is that more and more people are seeing through them and realizing they're not even good myths. Myths are never lies. The hundredth monkey is not a lie. But the myths we've been fed for the last 50-100 years are baldfaced lies. And a lot of folks, realizing this, enter panic mode without even realizing why.
It's because emotionally, we have to have that cultural bedrock. Lose it, and you're lost. The reason you and I and the others here are not in panic mode is that we have established a new bedrock, and it has its own myths. That's a big oversimplification of course of why we're here, but it's part of the picture. You can see this in people. They're starting to snarl. They don't even know why. I'm seeing a sudden increase in brand-new, big-tired, tricked-out pickup trucks on the freeways. And they drive like great big, lit-up bats from hell. Are these guys nuts? It's just the best they can do for spiritual comfort food. Time for big-time ho'oponopono!
This is hardly the first time in history that authorities have created, even enforced, mythic reality. The Romans did. The Catholics always have. The Communists did and do. Jim Jones and old crazy Charley Manson did. So it's probably not the first time that waves of people have waked up and said, "This is ox droppings." Mostly, that's been a dangerous thing to do. Right now everything's dangerous.
8-D
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